The Labour Party and Social Democracy (1975)

From the July 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years the so-called right-wing of the Labour Party has taken to calling themselves “social democrats”. The term is also used by some of those — such as Dick Taverne, Christopher Mayhew and Lord Chalfont — who have left the Labour Party because they feel it has become too much dominated by its “left wing”.

What, then, is a social democrat supposed to be? Before the First World War it was almost a synonym for Socialist, even though Engels never liked the word — and, indeed, in origin it did mean a democrat who also favoured social reforms, as opposed to a democrat pure and simple. On the other hand, “social democracy” could be an alternative name for Socialism — as a society characterised not only by a democratic administration, but also by democratic control of all aspects of social life, including the use of the means of production — and was indeed used as such in the very early issues of the Socialist Standard.

But those who call themselves “social democrats” in the Labour Party certainly do not want to suggest that they stand for a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole community. Quite the contrary. They want to make it clear that they accept legal, private property rights, as one of them, Ashley Bramall, a Labour GLC leader wrote in a letter to The Times:

Social democracy involves the acceptance of a mixed economy, but a mixed economy in which public ownership is the predominant and not the subordinate form of ownership. It involves far greater equality than exists at present.

Social democrats are, 1 suppose, distinguished from some other socialists by believing (1) that socialism is to be obtained only by the processes of democracy; (2) that democratically enacted laws are to be obeyed, and (3) that property should not be acquired without compensation.

In other words, they are using the word to mean a democrat who wished to reform capitalism by a certain amount of state control and intervention.

Bramall claims to be a “socialist” as well. We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain are not alone in rejecting this claim. The journalist Peter Jenkins discussed this in an article in the New Statesman called “The Social Democratic Dilemma”. He wrote:

“Now it is of no practical importance, and of small ideological significance, whether the Labour Party chooses to call itself ‘socialist ’or ‘social democratic’. But for our purpose here we must be clear as to what we mean. The word Socialism originally had a quite precise meaning and the late George Lichtheim’s uncompromising formulation is historically the correct one. He wrote: ‘Anything that falls short of abolishing the wage relation has no claim to being described as socialism, although it may be station on the way thereto".

(New Statesman 24 Sept. 1974)

We cannot agree that it is possible to have any “station on the way” to Socialism — either you have capitalism or you have Socialism, you cannot have anything between — but otherwise Lichtheim’s point about Socialism being a wageless society is very important. Wages are a price, the price of a person’s ability to work. But the very fact that most people’s ability to work has a price shows that it is a commodity and that they are excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production and have to sell their ability to work in order to live. Socialists even before the time of Marx denounced the wages system and called for its abolition. Today the wages system can only be abolished by the conversion of the means of production into the common property of society and their democratic control by the people who make up society. Then the producers would cease to be wage-earners and instead become free and equal men and women cooperating to produce what they needed to live and enjoy life.

Jenkins went on to suggest a definition of “social democracy”. He wrote :

“. . . we should mean a form of policies or economic organisation of society which does not envisage, or indeed intend, the achievement of socialism in a future however distant. Whether this is ideologically congenial or not it is surely an accurate enough description of reality. Can it, then, be seriously contended that the Labour Party is working towards or envisages the achievement of socialism?”

Of course, not. Jenkins realizes that the Labour Party stands for trying to reform capitalism and has never stood for the abolition of the wages system.

Adam Buick